Agility: An Essential Characteristic for Successful Businesses

Agility: The ability to move quickly and easily

When it comes to agility it’s easy to envision athletes, but what about businesses? With so many operational “moving parts” in a business, agility is not an expectation but more often, an exception.

Here at PRISCON, we believe agility is a necessity.

Agility allows for businesses to operate with flexibility, speed, strength, and creativity. Whether providing a service or a product, it’s important to recognize that as pillars of growth, business operations don’t live in a silo; they are very much tied to customers’ needs. And customers needs change regularly as a result of environment, culture, and technology. The ability for a company to be agile can determine the long-term success of a product, a service, and a brand.

All things considered, being agile doesn’t mean that any time there is a crisis or sales drop, it’s time to build a new business plan or restructure the organization. Agility means that decisions can be made quickly and there is an opportunity to try new things, fail, learn, and try again. Agility can be an initiative as much as it can be a response. It should never be a reaction, and it should always be part of the method for carrying out a plan.

The beauty of agility is that while it demonstrates flexibility, speed, strength, and creativity, those same qualities are part of agility. For a company to respond to market demands or changes, it doesn’t automatically mean that the whole company has to change, but parts of it can. By changing operations, the order processing team can speed up their workflow and deliver products faster. The product development team can experiment with additional products that enhance core offerings- think of how many flavors, colors, and designs of Oreos are now on the grocery store shelves. Agility within brand integrity demonstrates strength and consistency which continue to build trust and loyalty.

In the world of the athlete, strength supports agile body motion to avoid or sustain contact. Flexibility allows athletes to adjust themselves to a position of strength even at the last moment and with almost no notice. Speed keeps momentum and creativity leads to in-the-moment strategy development. So whether you’re responsible for a company, a department, or a team of one, use agility to remain competitive, reinvent yourself, and respond to the market.